Cold War Iron Curtain & Divided Borderland

1938 - 1945

The Anschluss of 1938 destroyed the Sheva Kehillot within months. Jewish communities that had survived Magyarization and the border shift — Eisenstadt, Mattersburg, Kobersdorf, Lackenbach, Frauenkirchen, Kittsee, Deutschkreuz — were deported, their synagogues desecrated, their communal records scattered. No living Jewish community remains in any of the Seven Communities; what survives is fragmentary — cemetery inscriptions, the Austrian Jewish Museum (founded 1972), memorial plaques, and the Rabbi Meir Eisenstadt grave that still draws Orthodox pilgrims. At Rechnitz, approximately 180 Hungarian-Jewish forced labourers were murdered at the Kreuzstadl on 24-25 March 1945 by local Nazi officials and guests at a castle party. The mass graves have never been found despite repeated searches. The 'wall of silence' documented in the 1994 film Totschweigen, and the Refugius association founded in 1993 by Pastor Wolfgang Schlaffer, embody Austria's difficulty in confronting its Nazi past. Do not resolve the question of local complicity; it remains unresolved. The Rechnitz case has become a national metaphor — not a closed chapter but an open wound.

From 1989

After 1989 the militarised border became a Schengen corridor, and Burgenland's cross-border heritage gained new visibility — but also new frames. The Fertő/Neusiedler See UNESCO inscription (2001) re-cast the previously divided landscape as a shared European heritage, jointly managed by Austria and Hungary. Yet the UNESCO 'harmonious cultural landscape' language can downplay the violent ruptures — Ottoman conquest, Counter-Reformation, Magyarization, Nazi destruction, Iron Curtain division — that severed cultural continuities across those same eight millennia. Minority cultural revival is the era's most tangible achievement. The Roman language of Burgenland Roma was inscribed as UNESCO intangible heritage (2011); Roma received minority recognition in 1993 (17 years after the Volksgruppengesetz excluded them). The Stinatzer Hochzeit / Stinjačka svadba was inscribed as intangible heritage, and the kirvaj tradition continues in Croat villages. Bilingual signage (51 signs erected in 2000) and Hungarian-language primary education in Oberwart (since 1995) maintain visible minority identity. Nickelsdorf-Hegyeshalom, once a militarised checkpoint, is now a Schengen transit corridor. But Roma cultural visibility remains minimal compared to Croats and Hungarians, and most pre-war Roma oral heritage is permanently lost. Walk the Neusiedl lakeshore today and you experience a landscape where every political layer — Roman, Hungarian, Ottoman, Habsburg, Iron Curtain, European — is simultaneously present and contested.

1921 - 1938

The 1921 transfer of Deutsch-Westungarn to Austria — officially incorporated on 5 December — was the outcome of international treaties (Saint-Germain, Trianon) contested by both sides, not a 'natural return' of German-speaking territory. The Sopron plebiscite (14-16 December 1921) further complicated the story: Sopron voted to remain Hungarian, earning the title 'Civitas Fidelissima,' while five of eight surrounding villages voted for Austria. The Lajtabánság episode — a short-lived unrecognized state patrolled by Rongyos Gárda paramilitaries — remains politically charged; both 'freedom fighter' and 'paramilitary' framings exist. Jobbik held a commemorative ceremony in Oberwart as recently as 2010, sparking an Austrian parliamentary inquiry. The Landhaus Eisenstadt (built 1926-1929) became the seat of the new Burgenland Landtag, an architectural embodiment of the region's transformation from Hungarian county to Austrian federal state. Jewish communities in the Sheva Kehillot — Kobersdorf, Mattersburg, Deutschkreuz — navigated the transition from Hungarian to Austrian rule, their communal structures now answerable to a new state. The Stadtschlaining Old Synagogue survives as a material trace of this precarious interwar existence.

1867 - 1920

The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 brought Magyarization as state policy to the region's non-Hungarian populations. Croat-language schools were closed, Croatian was banned from church use, and Hungarian became mandatory in administration. This documented policy was not uniquely Hungarian — similar nation-building assimilation occurred across Europe — but its specific effects on Burgenland's minorities were severe: Croat oral tradition survived Magyarization (written traditions were suppressed), but the ban on Croat-language church services disrupted liturgical calendar traditions that were only restored after 1955. The wine economy continued to structure rural life. Rust's 1524 export privilege from Queen Maria still governed the Ruster Ausbruch trade, and the Buschenschank season (Martiniloben, St. Martin's Day, November 11) carried the Pannonian wine harvest calendar through political upheaval. Mattersburg (Nagymarton) and Deutschkreuz (Sopronkeresztúr), both members of the Sheva Kehillot with Jewish populations reaching 40-50%, saw their German-Jewish communal institutions pressured by Hungarian-language mandates. The Hungarian population of the region numbered 26,600 in the 1910 census; post-1921 emigration of Hungarian civil servants would dramatically reduce this.